Friends of the Center
GoalsAsia is vast, its lands and peoples reflect the world’s earliest civilizations. Asian nations are also moving into the future, their populations mobilizing a range of resources as they participate in our increasingly transnational and cosmopolitan world.
The UC Irvine Center for Asian Studies captures the diversity and promise of Asia well, its almost forty faculty members in five different schools researching and publishing on important issues, but more can be done. The Department of East Asian Studies in the School of Humanities offers Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, but there is student demand for more, especially Tagalog, Hindi and Sanskrit.
Some forty graduate students study aspects of Asian history, culture, and politics in departments across the campus, most notably history, political science, anthropology and film studies, but more students could come: applicants from Asia, in particular, need financial backing to come to UCI. The Center would like to expand and heighten its impact on academic knowledge internationally and strengthen community-building in its immediate area.
Our Goals Are Important
China and India are the world’s most populous nations with Japan, Korea, Taiwan, India and Indonesia as vibrant democracies increasingly influential in the world today. The major world religions of Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Sikhism, Jainism and Shintoism all began in Asia. Indonesia has the world’s largest Muslim population, and substantial Muslim populations are found in throughout South Asia as well.
Our students learn about Asia and contribute their knowledge to society in many ways, working as academics in institutions of higher education and as experts in international business, law and social service organizations. Some help build cultural understanding through the arts, and all enhance understandings of Asia in numerous ways in their daily lives.
We want more students at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and we want more faculty members, so that the center’s capacities can be expanded to produce more knowledge and serve more people.
YOU Can Help us Achieve Our Goals
The center has excellent resources, both on campus and off, but it needs help to maximize them. Situated in the midst of Orange County’s varied and vibrant Asian immigrant communities, many of our students come from those communities, while others from around the world can take advantage of their proximity to these different communities to experience Asian immigrant cultures.
The center would like to bring more graduate students and more scholars, writers and artists from Asia, but rising tuition and living costs have made that harder to do. We have initiated exchange programs with a Chinese and a Japanese university but much more can be done. Generous donors will make the difference between having goals and achieving them.
To invest in the Center for Asian Studies, please contact:
Linda Haghi, Executive Director of Development at (949) 824-2923
To receive announcements about our programs and events, please contact:
Amanda Swain